Install Open Web Analytics (OWA) on CentOS 7

In today’s article we will install Open Web Analytics (OWA) on a CentOS 7 VPS. Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open source web analytics software that you can use to track and analyze how people use your websites and applications. It is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. OWA is similar to Google Analytics although it is a server software that anyone can install and run it on a Linux VPS.

OWA is licensed under GPL and provides website owners and developers with easy ways to add web analytics to their sites using simple Javascript, PHP, or REST based APIs. It also comes with built-in support for tracking websites made with popular content management frameworks such as WordPress and MediaWiki.

Unzip the downloaded archive. If you don’t have unzip installed on your server, you can do it using: yum install unzip

# unzip 1.6.0.zip

Rename the unpacked directory into a more suitable and easier to remember value. The below command does exactly that and moves the directory into Apache’s document root (/var/www/html):

# mv Open-Web-Analytics-1.6.0/ /var/www/html/owa/

Enter the directory:

# cd /var/www/html/owa/

Your next step is to create a database for OWA. But before doing that, if you don’t have an active MySQL root password feel free to run the post-installation script ‘mysql_secure_installation’ in order to set a root password:

Save and close the file. Last but not least, assign the proper ownership of the owa directory.

# chown apache: -R /var/www/html/owa/

Now open your favorite web browser and navigate to http://your_domain.com to finish the OWA installation. You will be welcomed by a page as shown in the image below.

Click on ‘Let’s Get Started‘. Enter the Site Domain, your email address and the password which will be valid for the admin user. Click on ‘Continue‘.

You will get a ‘Success! That’s It. Installation is Complete‘ message. Next, click on ‘Login and generate a site tracker‘

Congratulations. If you followed the tutorial closely you now have a working Open Web Analytics installation that you can use to track your websites. You may want to check OWA documentation for more info on the software features, framework etc…

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install OWA for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

PS. If you liked this post please share it with your friends on the social networks using the buttons on the left or simply leave a reply below. Thanks.